Location analytics company Placed (owned by Snap) is launching “Placed Insights,” a free tool that allows users to visualize and better understand location data. Placed founder David Shim told me that he believes this will help agencies and advertisers see the value of location intelligence and boost the entire industry.

Shim said that Placed has made its “full data set” available in the tool, which is comprised of first, second and third party data. The free version doesn’t have all the capabilities of a paid, premium version but it’s still very interesting and instructive.

Shim hopes that agencies and brands will use the tool to understand how location data can offer insights into audiences, brand affinities and competitive benchmarking. He hopes that once people begin to play with it that they’ll start asking more questions about their customers and their competitors’ audiences as well.

Users can search or browse by category or brand to discover share of category visits and get other data. In the chart above, Walmart was the retailer that saw the largest share of physical store visits in January, on a national basis, followed by McDonald’s and Starbucks.

If users further explore Starbucks’ foot traffic, they’ll see that the coffee chain dominates its category with nearly 78 percent of visits compared to other national coffee and tea chain competitors, such as Peet’s or Caribou Coffee.

The tool also provides Starbucks’ foot traffic data by region and day of week. According to the graphic, more than 40 percent of Starbucks’ customers are in the Western US. The day on which it sees the most foot traffic is Tuesday, though visitation is pretty steady throughout the week. Sunday is its slowest day.

You can see how far people travel from home or work to get to a particular retailer or type of business, which has implications for geotargeting/geofencing and other non-commercial use cases. In Eugene Oregon, for example, 50 percent of Starbucks’ customers come from within 4 miles.

Placed Insights allows users to explore shopping and brand affinities. For example, Starbucks customers tend to shop at Safeway and bank at Chase in higher numbers than the general population. They’re less likely to go to Wendy’s. Starbucks’ customers’ top category affinity is travel and they have the lowest affinity for Piggly Wiggly stores.

These kinds of insights and correlations can lead to new types of promotions and other opportunities. Starbucks and Chase might want to co-locate their storefronts, as one possibility.

To get finer or more customized slices of the data, you’ll need to buy into the premium category. But Shim says he sees this less as a lead-generation tool for Placed in particular and more as a way to educate marketers and agencies about the power of location data. He hopes that this will do for location what the free version of Google Analytics free did for website analytics.

Placed competitors PlaceIQ, GroundTruth and others also offer dashboards. But this is first free tool making the data widely discoverable.

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.